The Refugee Project is an amazing digital project visualizing the spreading of refugees over the world since 1975. Not surprisingly the project was selected for London Design Museum’s Designs of the Year. The eighth edition of this show celebrating design that promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year opened last week.
The Refugee Project was launched early last year by Brooklyn based design firm Hyperakt and Nigerian-American artist and designer Ekene Ijeoma. They used UN data to visualize refugee volumes over time and added a layer of historical content to help explain the events that caused some of the largest refugee movements of the last four decades.
The map only considers millions of refugees who fled their countries and were officially registered as refugees. Economic migrants, as well as displaced persons within their native countries were not taken into account.
Still the map is impressive. First of all because of the story it tells about the rapidly growing numbers of refugees, from 3 million in 1975, to 10 million in 1982, and the peak of 17 million in 1990 when 6 million people alone fled Afghanistan. But this map impresses too with all the information that is incorporated and the incredible amount of volunteer work that is behind it.
The refugee issue is one of the topics at this year’s edition of What Design Can Do. The Refugee Project shows you what we will actually talking about.